Tottori Gyukotsu Ramen

A clear, golden broth carries a toasty note different from pork bone or chicken. Beef bone gives it a light sweetness and body, without the heaviness of tonkotsu. Paired with soy tare, the finish stays clean, an unpretentious bowl eaten day and night across central Tottori. It's often served at yakiniku restaurants too, light enough to slide down like a closing course after grilled meat.

Beef bones are simmered slowly for a long stretch to build the stock. One account holds that some shops originally simmered beef and pork bones together before settling on beef alone. Beef bone reportedly holds up well even past ten hours of simmering, growing more savory rather than gamey, and that forgiving quality is thought to have shaped the local method. The long-simmer process itself seems to have been refined simply through being cooked over and over as everyday food.

Central Tottori, around the foot of Mount Daisen, has long been cattle country. Chicken bones were once relatively costly, while beef bones were comparatively cheap and close at hand, and using what was locally available seems the natural root of this broth. Neither pork bone nor chicken, this bowl reads as a shape that only a cattle-raising town would land on. Making stock from whatever was on hand locally became, in effect, the backbone of the broth itself.